Contents

Bulganin was born in Nizhny Novgorod, the son of an office worker. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and was recruited in 1918 into the Cheka, the Bolshevik regime's political police, where he served until 1922. After the Russian Civil War, he became an industrial manager and worked in the electricity administration until 1927. He was director of the Moscow electricity supply in 1927–1931. In 1931–1937, Bulganin was chairman of the executive committee of the Moscow City Soviet.

During World War II, Bulganin played a leading role in the government and Red Army, although he was never a front-line commander. He was given the rank of Colonel-General and was a member of the State Defense Committee. He was appointed Deputy Commissar for Defence in 1944 and served as Stalin's principal agent in the High Command of the Red Army. In 1947, he became Minister for the Armed Forces and was promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. He also became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Communist Party. He was again Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, under Stalin, from 1947 to 1950. In 1948, he became a full member of the Politburo.

After Stalin's death in March 1953, Bulganin moved into the first rank of the Soviet leadership, being appointed to the key post of Defense Minister. He was an ally of Nikita Khrushchev during his power struggle with Georgy Malenkov, and in February 1955 he succeeded Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union.[2] He was generally seen as a supporter of Khrushchev's reforms and destalinization. He and Khrushchev travelled together to India, Yugoslavia and Britain, where they were known in the press as "the B and K show."[3] In his memoirs, however, Khrushchev recounted that he believed that he "couldn't rely on [Bulganin] fully."[4]

Bulganin and Khrushchev in India

During the Suez Crisis of October–November 1956, Bulganin sent letters to the governments of the United Kingdom, France, and Israel threatening rocket attacks on London, Paris, and Tel Aviv if they did not withdraw their forces from Egypt. In a letter to Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, Bulganin wrote, "Israel is playing with the fate of peace, with the fate of its own people, in a criminal and irresponsible manner; [...] which will place a question [mark] upon the very existence of Israel as a State."[5] Khrushchev, in his memoirs, admitted the threat was designed simply to divide Western opinion, especially since at the time he did not have enough ICBMs to launch the rockets, and in any case he had no intention of going to war in 1956.

By 1957, however, Bulganin had come to share the doubts held about Khrushchev's policies by the opposition group (which Khrushchev and his supporters labeled the "Anti-Party Group") led by Vyacheslav Molotov. In June, when the dissenters tried to remove Khrushchev from power at a meeting of the Politburo, Bulganin vacillated between the two camps. When the dissenters were defeated and removed from power, Bulganin held on to his position for a while, but in March 1958, at a session of the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev forced his resignation.[2] He was appointed Chairman of the Soviet State Bank, a job he had held two decades before, but in September Bulganin was removed from the Central Committee and deprived of the title of Marshal. He was dispatched to Stavropol as Chairman of the Regional Economic Council, a token position, and in February 1960 he was retired on a pension.